House of Burgess

On Monday I was the only reporter in the office, so of course that's when the sheriff's department released four press releases. All told, I wrote six stories, three of which had my byline, and took the centerpiece picture. Overall, I think I had a pretty successful day as the only mistakes in the stories I wrote, as far as I could tell, were that I accidentally said "Ukiah Valley Fire" responded to a blaze in Talmage instead of "Ukiah Fire" (my bad) and the word "seized" was misspelled in a headline I didn't write.
I still get nervous when I have to do action/crime reporter Ben Brown's job when he's gone, but despite my fears I think I have gotten a little better at it over time.
One of the first times I had to cover for Ben I was doing the calls before I went home. This entails running through a list of phone numbers and asking if anyone had anything to report. When I called the California Department of Forestry's Howard Forest Willits Grade Dispatch they told me that three divers had been rescued in Westport and that an additional diver was not recovered until the next day. Here's the two inch story I submitted for the Daily Digest on Page 2 that day:

FIRE AND RESCUE
RESCUE -- Three divers were rescued at 6:40 p.m. Wednesday near 33000 N. Highway 1. The three divers were stranded on the rocks with an additional person in the water in Westport behind Highway 1. CAlFire, Westport Fire, US Coast Gaurg (yes, that was how I spelled it), Ft. Bragg Ambulance and Mendocino Ambulance responded. Workers were not able to locate the fourth person, but the person was located Thursday.

I went home that night thinking I had nailed it. How wrong I was.
When I got to work the next morning, this is the headline and first paragraph of a story that appeared on one of the section fronts of that edition of one of our rival papers:

Abalone diver's body recovered
Oakland man 7th fatality off Mendocino County coast this year; 2 companions rescued
The body of an abalone diver was recovered Thursday afternoon after two divers rescued at the scene the day before returned to pull their companion from the ocean.

Whoops.
Let's do a rundown of what I screwed up on this, shall we?
1) This is probably the most important thing. The person at the CDF station used the word "recovered." As I sort of implied that the guy made it in my account of the event, I obviously completely misunderstood the meaning of this word when I heard it.
2) "Coast Gaurg"? I don't have a spell check on my computer for some strange reason, but I still think this is a bit of a large oversight. To be fair, I was terrified as I was typing this and slipping two keys to the right of the "D" key on my keyboard is at least conceivable.
3) Apparently, I added another rescued diver. I honestly don't know how that happened other than I heard it wrong or was told it wrong.
Whatever the case, at least you can't say I misunderestimated (as George W. is wont to say) the rescuing power of our local first responders.